u t Ilfflllil" U11I' IIJl It I g }i: .!: I ir . "I '" ., I.. ' ,(1 J I , , ' f t ,: ::1 . ..... f ...... 11 If' '__' iii '1 1 } I HI (t I f ' Ai 'I r . I " " f ,.;Jljl j i ll 'I"H,' jþ -- iii. , - - (' i, J 1 n I I. 1\"" I I"'" 1 1 11 J) g" -* I r ,-.." It " I, '=-.... I J : 1::"/ · ::;1........ -. I I )}. \ "-'W :11' '1.' ..... ....-;: - f-- , -. b l t - r .'" -- --:; --" -.- , il ì IJ . -:;. ....... ;.1...... J Ã ...;:;;J r;.:t . { f w .,./V "' :;j ;';;";;j :.::::___ 1 I. --<e" \ ' .. J .. ', '- "' "." - .-: · ....... · " I ...... - ..... fa ......,- I' A';"; I I \ '.. J , ,---' , ----..... t AI .. ) - r:-"" I .. ' \ \ "J.;-' I: I 4f " J"""" " - " 'I _ ....---::. 'h, -. ;:.. ::::F. , 0_; \.l Atr"' j , -_; 'If" , ,"""- '" 'i ' ... / . ,, Enforcement Administration estimates, grosses twenty-five billion dollars a year, and so qualifies as the richest criminal conspiracy in the world. The Cali has lately overtaken its principal Colombian rival, the Medellin cartel; it was helped when the Medellín boss Pablo Escobar was shot and killed by the ColombIan au- thorities, in December, 1993. The Caleños produce perhaps eighty per cent of the world's cocaine, and are now said to be the No.3 supplier of heroin, lag- ging behind only the Southeast Asian traffickers. The United States is by far the Cali's largest export market. Though the Cali cartel has a reputa- tion for being less violent than the --...,...- Medellin, it is alleged thatJosé Santacruz Londoño, who is reputedly one of its leaders, ordered the murder, in 1992, of Manuel de Dios Unanue, a former edItor of El Diario, New York's largest Spanish- language newspaper, after de Dios made it known that he was about to publish a book exposIng top members of the car- tel. And there is not much doubt that Cali operatives in the United States, who number in the hundreds, fear the bosses in Colombia. When such operatives are arrested and offered a chance to coöperate with the government, many refuse, be- cause, they say, their family members in Colombia will be killed. The Cali is run in some respects like a multinational corporation and in other respects like an espionage ring. Its United States operatives work in small, self- contained enterprises that are called cells. The drug cells handle the drugs, the w money cells handle the money, and the two enterprises are kept entirely separate. <3 Even within a cell, operatives may know one another only by their beeper num- bers. (Transfers of cash from a drug cell to a money cell are handled only by the cell leaders.) New York has by far the heaviest concentration of money cells in the United States, and they tend to have their headquarters in the sections of Qyeens near Shea Stadium that have large Colombian populations, notably Jackson Heights and Corona (which are calied Little Colombia), and also Rego Park, Woodside, Elmhurst, and flush- ing. A beehive of activity in any money cell is the "stash house," a house or an apartment in which cash is secreted, of- ten in the millions of dollars. A stash house may also be the repository of the cell's ledgers, which reflect the corporate aspect of the cartel. Every dollar of rev- enue is accounted for-one steals from the cartel at considerable risk-and so is every expenditure, no matter how picayune. One set of records seized by EI Dorado contained a ledger item that gave an indication of the enormous sums the cell had handled: two hundred dol- lars a week spent on rubber bands. The goal of the money cell is a simple one: to get large amounts of cash into the banking system. Smurfing the cash directly into a United States bank account is only one method, and is by no means the most effective. Since the passage, in 1992, of the Annunzio- Wylie Act, which makes willful blind- ness on the part of a financial institu- tion a punishable offense, United States banks have tended to report more de- posItors who appear to be smurfs. (The banks' coöperation in detecting drug- money launderers is "excellent," Trea- sury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen says.) 27 Smurfs can also take cash to a money transmitter and wire the money out of the country. When it comes to sheer volume, however, the most efficient means of getting cash into the banking system is to smuggle it to Colombia, or to some other country with less strin- gent banking laws than ours, such as Panama. Once the dollars are deposited in a foreign bank, some of them come back electronically to accounts in the United States. Colombian drug dealers need to maintain large bank balances here to provide working capital for their United States operations-for salaries, rented houses, cars, cellular phones, money-counting machines, lawyers. #. .."'- /' '- /' Currency is smuggled out just the way drugs are smuggled in-in any con- veyance that might escape detection. Literaliy millions of dollars have been stuffed into air compressors, furniture, stereo speakers, Nintendo tapes, truck transmissions, dolls, hollowed -out tele- visions, containers of dried peas. In 1990, almost fourteen million dollars in Cali drug money was found in a ware- house on Long Island, inside spools of wire cable to be shipped to Bogotá. (Un- fortunately, the cell's records showed that this was to have been the two-hundred- and-thirty-fourth shipment of cash- laden spools.) The same year, customs agents searching the perishables ware- house at Kennedy Airport found twenty- six cans that were supposed to contain frozen bull semen but instead held six and a haJJ million dollars in cash This past May, agents of EI Dorado raided a house on Long Island and found a bowling-bali-manufacturing shop in the basement; they sawed one ballln half